Just leads to more questions! What is boosting anyway? Should I boost a post or create a Facebook Ad? What does boosting do for my posts? How much does it cost to boost? It can be a bit overwhelming—so let’s take it one step at a time!
What does it mean to boost a Facebook post?
We have all seen the little blue button on the bottom of our Facebook posts (see fig.1). Notice, on the far left, you can also see how many people this post reached. This is a good place to start when explaining boosting. Reach means how many people have seen your post. If you want to grow reach—and have more people see your content—then you pay Facebook.
How much you pay Facebook to increase reach (boost a post) is entirely up to you! Boosting is much easier to do than a Facebook ad. When you boost, you are able to choose an audience beyond the people who like your page. You get a few choices when you boost (see fig. 2):
Choose people you choose through targeting to get a more specific audience (see fig. 3). Choose people who like your page to boost only to them. Choose people in your local area for boosting in a geographical location. You can also create a new audience with specific gender, age and location.
Next choose the Duration and Budget of your boosted post (see fig.4). And boost away! You will get some simple analytics to see how the boost performed.
A popular reason to boost is to let your existing audience in on a new promotion, new product, or announcement. Keep in mind that Facebook is very particular about how much text is within an image—so use minimal text on the image itself. No more than 20% of the image should contain text—according to Facebook. Facebook will reject a boosted image with too much text. How it decides which posts are ok—that is up to the algorithms. However, you can request to have a post manually reviewed for boosting.
Boosting posts is a simple and cost-effective way to reach more of your audience. It is not necessarily to generate sales leads or sell in general. It can bring new traffic and new page likes, but remember not to over-do it! One boost a week is good.
The bottom line is that it all depends on what you want to achieve. To Boost or not to boost? I think that ultimately depends on what you want to achieve—and if that’s reaching more of your audience or new page likes—boost it is!